


Absence Makes The Handset Grow Fonder

by equestrianstatue



Category: Life on Mars (UK)
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-28
Updated: 2014-01-28
Packaged: 2018-01-10 10:07:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1158352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/equestrianstatue/pseuds/equestrianstatue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam has a visitor from the future. Or the past, depending on which way you look at it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Absence Makes The Handset Grow Fonder

**Author's Note:**

> Apparently in 2007 there was a brief vogue for Sam/Sam's mobile phone.
> 
> First posted to lifein1973 in August 2007.

i. Monday

Sam wakes up and the phone is ringing. Sam often wakes up because the phone is ringing, real or imaginary, so he's not terribly shocked, once he thinks about it.

"Hello?" he says into the receiver, slightly groggily.

"Hello, Sam," says the girl from Test Card F.

The phone hasn't stopped ringing. Sam looks from the phone in his hand to the girl in red, back to the phone, back to the girl in red. He swallows hard. "What do you want?"

"I brought you a present," says the girl, grinning. The mobile phone in her hand is ringing.

Sam still dislikes the girl intensely, and would very much like to push his head under his pillow until she disappears, but instead, he says, "Give me that."

"The call isn't for you," says the girl. She presses a button and puts it to her ear. "Hello?"

Sam bunches up the blanket around his chest and watches.

"Hello?" She hangs up, and smiles at him. "See? Wrong number."

"Give me that," says Sam, "I want that."

"You're not asking nicely," says the girl.

"Please," says Sam.

And then he wakes up.

 

ii. Tuesday

Annie's used to it by now: the wild eyes, the flushed skin, the flights of fancy that grab him halfway through something completely unrelated and take the two of them spinning off into a different world; a world full of technology and words she doesn't recognise and everything expressed through initials. VCR, DVD, RAM, SMS.

"Sam." She's half-laughing. "Sam, you can't _have_ a phone that's not attached to a cord. It wouldn't work. What would – what would your voice being going through?"

"The air!" Sam's arms flail slightly, as if this might help her grasp the concept of where, exactly, the air is.

"And anyway – what's the point? Why would you want another way of talking to people when you're walking around? We've got radios on patrol."

"Oh, Annie." That grin, that grin she sees so rarely, where his eyes shine, and his teeth part slightly, and it looks like he's trying to split his face in two, presumably because _one_ face simply cannot contain the sheer amount of joy he's attempting to express. "It's so much more than that. It's a different level, a different _plateau_ of communication, a whole – a whole _multimedia experience_."

Annie has no idea what he has just said, so she nods and smiles.

 

iii. Wednesday

By the standards of the world that Sam currently inhabits, Monday and Tuesday were not very strange days.

Wednesday is very strange.

The phone just hovers there, slightly behind and above Gene's left shoulder. Sam gapes at it.

Gene frowns back at him. "What?"

Sam squeezes his eyes shut for a couple of seconds, pinches his forearm, and opens his eyes again. A weak ray of light glints off the mobile phone, still apparently suspended in mid-air.

"It's a phone," he tells Gene, stupidly.

"Chris," says Gene, "answer the phone."

"Not Chris's phone." Sam wonders why he mentioned this at all, but decides he might as well press on. "There's a phone in the air."

Gene opens his mouth, but appears to actually be unable to work out how best to reply to this.

"It's a Siemens," Sam adds, helpfully.

"It's a _what_?"

"Move your head to the left," says Sam. Gene gives him a baffled look and inclines his head towards the phone. The phone moves away from him.

"Look left!" Sam snaps, and Gene whirls his head around. He stares straight at Chris as if nothing was in the way. Chris raises his eyebrows.

"I think," says Sam, "that I might be hallucinating."

"I think," says Gene, "that you might be a few nuts short of a fruitcake."

The phone spends the rest of the day bobbing cheerfully about Gene's shoulders. It hovers innocuously for the most part, although seems to have a habit of darting from side to side in a particularly distracting way whenever Sam attempts to say anything to him.

It follows them about the station and to the pub at the end of the day, becoming all but frenzied when Sam attempts to get a round in, buffeting between the glasses until Sam manages to spill most of his own drink down himself, and frankly refusing to be seen by anybody else.

Sam leaves early. The phone does not follow him home. He collapses onto the bed and hopes that the day has been a very long and complicated dream, which seems unlikely, but he supposes that isn't much of an argument against anything any more.

 

iv. Thursday

The girl from the test card is talking quietly into a mobile phone when Sam wakes up.

"Sorry," says the girl, "I've got to go. A friend is here." She hangs up. "Hello, Sam."

"Hello," says Sam, for want of anything better to say. Augh! What do you want?! was getting a bit old, anyway.

"You haven't got many friends," the girl tells him. "You want to be careful about losing them."

"Right," says Sam.

"You used to think about your mobile phone a lot," she continues. "I used to hear you in the night. But not any more." She holds up her ragdoll. "If I lost my clown, I would think about it all I could, or it would get jealous of the new friends I made."

"My mobile phone," says Sam, "is not jealous."

"It is very difficult to break through the barrier of consciousness," says the girl, knowledgably, "even as a non-tangible hallucination. I think your phone must be quite determined to get your attention back."

"What?" says Sam.

"It doesn't like you talking to your new friend," giggles the girl, "does it?"

"How do you know?"

"Oh, I know all about you, Sam. But I don't think you know all about you any more. You're going to have to choose, soon."

"Choose what?"

"Roses are red," she replies, in a sing-song voice, "Violets are blue. The future's orange, and the past is through."

Sam rubs his eyes. "That didn't really help."

"Where does your heart lie, Sam? You can't know yourself if you don't know what you truly love."

"I'm not sure that my true love is a mobile phone," says Sam, "or Gene Hunt."

"You'd be surprised," says the girl. "Although it's probably a metaphor for the past and the future."

"I don't believe this," says Sam.

"Well," says the girl, "this isn't my fault. It is your subconsious, after all."

Sam wakes up with a bitter morning taste in his mouth.

The phone is still floating around CID when Sam arrives. Apparently bolder, now, it moves directly in front of Sam's nose every time he tries to say something to Gene. He ends up cross-eyed, and quite cross in general.

"Spit it out, Tyler."

Sam makes a valiant third attempt to ask Gene something that he can't even quite remember himself any more, but he thinks might have been about a file, whilst the phone zooms between them, drawing figures of eight in the air. Sam supposes he's gone through brief periods of being odder than normal before, since nobody at CID seems to be terribly worried by his current inability to complete sentences, just slightly irritated.

Choosing between them? Is this the definitive step all over again, except quite a lot less dramatic, and quite a lot more ridiculous? If choosing his phone means he'll wake up in a hospital bed, how is he supposes to signify that? Talk to it? Stroke it? He can't even touch the thing.

On the other hand, if he chooses the phone, will it just continue to follow him around in a relatively irritating manner for weeks to come?

The day goes by very, very slowly.

 

v. Friday

"I've had it," snaps Sam, finally. "Enough. Go. Please."

He leans against the sink, him and the phone, eye-to-screen, in a bizarre stand-off in the toilets.

"You have to leave me alone." Sam can't quite bring himself to look straight at it, which he cannot explain to himself at all. "It's not working."

And then, suddenly, Sam forgets to keep telling himself that this is all an insane fantasy, forgets that talking to a mobile phone is idiotic and that he should therefore be self-consious, and says, completely genuinely, "I'm sorry."

The phone moves slightly closer to him, and then – if it is possible for a phone to do such a thing – nuzzles briefly against his neck (although Sam doesn't so much feel it as find his neck goes a bit cold for a moment), and disappears with a quiet pop.

It's a bit of an anticlimax.

Sam puts the whole experience down to a change in medication, which seems to be as good an explanation as any these days, and gets on with the rest of his life, as it were, although he does feel inexplicably disconsolate for a while. He doesn't count the incident among his strangest, but he does, one evening, cut the cord of the distinctly non-mobile phone in his flat, for reasons he cannot entirely remember. He wakes up with the handset cradled in his arms, the rest of the phone lumped unceremoniously at the end of his bed.

"True love never dies," says the girl from the test card, perched on his little table across the room.

Sam closes his eyes until she is gone. He cannot quite bring himself to dispose of the severed handset. It now sits on his shelf, between the photo and the tissues, and occassionally Sam thinks he can hear a faint, monophonic rendition of an inane tune drifting across from it, but he tries not to think about that too much.


End file.
